VFX nominees draw on Nvidia technology

BEVERLY HILLS — This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expanded the Best Visual Effects category to five nominated films. All five relied on Nvidia Quadro professional graphics solutions to create groundbreaking effects.

Double Negative (www.dneg.com) created visual effects for several of this year’s nominated films, including Inception, Iron Man 2 and
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Central to DNeg’s effects workflow is their proprietary fluid simulation system, known as Squirt. A component of Squirt was recently rewritten to leverage the Nvidia CUDA parallel computing architecture and Quadro graphics processing units (GPUs).

Iron Man 2 features many visual effects created by Industrial Light & Magic (www.ilm.com). The studio works closely with Nvidia on GPU development to accelerate both effects creation and rendering pipelines.

Scanline VFX (www.scanlinevfx.com) used its proprietary Flowline simulation software to create natural phenomena, such as the tsunami recreation in
Hereafter. Scanline is now writing its next generation of Flowline as a CUDA architecture-based, GPU-optimized application.

Sony Pictures Imageworks (www.imageworks.com) completed the majority of the visual effects featured in
Alice in Wonderland, creating 1,700 shots in total. Effects accelerated by Nvidia GPUs include the mist and lightning emitted by Jabberwocky the dragon, the appearing and disappearing effects of the Cheshire Cat, and the dust and destruction caused by Bandersnatch.

The winner will be announced at the 83rd Annual Academy Award ceremony on Sunday, February 27.

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